Jake Heggie's spectacular vocal writing combine with Terence McNally's perfectly paced libretto to provide intense music drama which forces you to confront darkness.
Welsh National Opera’s new season commemorating the centenary of the 1917 Revolution with three Russian-themed works opens with both a bang and a whimper with this trenchant revival.
Mark Le Brocq portrays a convincing Gerontius while other soloists, choir and orchestra deliver a fine, moving performance of Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius.
The first UK production of Karl Amadeus Hartmann’s 1930s anti-war opera Simplicius Simplicissimus is a musical and dramatic triumph, and as pertinent as ever
André Tchaikowsky's version of The Merchant of Venice combines his love of Shakespeare with his recollections of a harsh childhood as a Jew in the Warsaw Ghetto.
Opera North's cycle offers a form of personal Wagner therapy: all four music dramas in concert performances, but with carefully choreographed video and lighting effects.
Der fliegende Holländer at Leeds Town Hall shows Opera North at its most exciting, in a production conducted by Richard Farnes, with Béla Perencz and Alwyn Mellor.
A very welcome and triumphant revival of Peter Grimes begins Opera North’s Festival of Britten season, soon to be followed by A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Death in Venice. The work has often been described as Britten’s greatest, the paeans of praise beginning soon after its first performance just after the Second World War, often involving the word “enigma”.
The strange yet compelling story of the 350-year-old opera singer Elina Makropulos was Opera North’s showcase in a production première at this year’s Edinburgh International Festival. Leoš Janáček wrote The Makropulos Affair, his penultimate opera, based on the Karel Čapek play about Elina Makropulos, who was given a potion to preserve her youth when she was sixteen.
